Recently, along with the spread of personal computers to homes, and the like, digital still cameras capable of inputting image information obtained by imaging a landscape, person, or the like to a personal computer have been spreading rapidly. In addition, more and more cell phones have built-in camera modules for inputting images. Such devices with image capturing capabilities employ image sensors such as CCDs, CMOSs, and the like. Recently, these types of image sensors have been downsized greatly and, consequently, image capturing devices as a whole and image capturing lenses to be mounted on such devices have also been required to have more compact sizes. At the same time, the pixel count of image sensors has been increasing, thereby causing a growing demand for improvement of image capturing lenses in resolution and performance. For example, performance corresponding to high pixel counts, such as more than 2 mega pixels (MP) and more preferably more than 5 MP, is demanded.
For such demands, it is conceivable to employ a five-lens configuration having a relatively large number of lenses in order, for example, to achieve the reduction in overall length and the improvement in the resolution (refer to U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 20070229984, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2007-298572, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2010-256608, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2011-085733, and U.S. Pat. No. 7,911,911).